Enewsletter

Enewsletter • January 30, 2008

Notes
from Vegan Outreach

Join Jon's Jaunt

Next
Monday, February 4, Jon Camp will
embark on a 10-week college leafleting
tour. He'll be leafleting in VA,
TN, KY (WKU only), AR, TX, OK, NM,
AZ, CO, WY, KS, MO, IL, IA, WI,
and WV. He'd love for you to experience
this powerful outreach firsthand.
If you'd like to join him for some
leafleting, or if you'd like for
him to meet with your local group,
please email jon
(at) veganoutreach (dot) org.
Thanks!

Aashish Bhimani leaflets at
George Mason; photo by Jon Camp.

Product of the Week

Deborah: Donna Klein's cookbooks:
Vegan Italiano and The
Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen have
provided me with wonderful authentic
meals. Even my Italian, meat-eating
husband (who is only eating vegetarian
meals at home to humor his wife)
is happy with the dishes found in
Klein's books.

Notes from All
Over

Once, these animals were raised
locally (even many New Yorkers
remember the pigs of Secaucus),
reducing transportation costs
and allowing their manure to be
spread on nearby fields. Now hog
production facilities that resemble
prisons more than farms are hundreds
of miles from major population
centers, and their manure “lagoons”
pollute streams and groundwater.
(In Iowa alone, hog factories
and farms produce more than 50
million tons of excrement annually.)

Animal welfare may not yet be
a major concern, but as the horrors
of raising meat in confinement
become known, more animal lovers
may start to react. And would
the world not be a better place
were some of the grain we use
to grow meat directed instead
to feed our fellow human beings?Full
story; see also "Eating
as if the Climate Mattered."

Vegan, vegetarian, vegetable
love (in fact, that's the title
of a 2005 Barbara Kafka tome),
meatless, and less-meat cookbooks
poured off the presses last year.
More encouragingly, vegetarian
cuisine has been sprung from its
health-food ghetto; slipped out
of oily, mock-meat Chinese prison.
If plant-based cookery was about
morality once (and there is a
profoundly moral case to be made
for it), its resurgent popularity
adds pleasure to the brief.

It's not just to choke down anymore.
It's to savor and celebrate. It's
hip, not hair-shirt. No members-only
card required. No consignment
to lifeless brown rice, peanuts
and broccoli. No suffocating,
lemme-outta-here absolutism. Say
hello to the new veganism -- culinary
sophistication, patient craft,
lovingly nuanced flavor. Full
story.

I consider myself an open-minded
person. So just because a group
attacks drunk-driving laws and
anti-smoking regulations, just
because it opposes replacing the
junk food in school cafeterias
and vending machines with healthy
snacks, just because it opposed
reducing the blood-alcohol level
that constitutes the legal definition
of drunk, and just because it
calls concerns about obesity "hype,"
do I dismiss its defense of mercury
in tuna fish? Of course not. Full
story.

Note that, because of their lower
fat content, vegetarian
meats like Gimme Lean, Boca
Burgers, Tofurky slices, and Morningstar
Meal Starters can provide a higher
percentage of calories from protein
than animal products.

Notes from Our
Members

While leafleting today,
one person told me his story of
why he went vegetarian: He worked
in a pig slaughterhouse in Louisville,
KY for 7 years, assisting in and/or
slaughtering upwards of 2,000 pigs
per day. He woke up one morning
and couldn't take it anymore, and
felt great remorse for killing all
of those animals over the years.
He and his wife are now vegetarian,
and he said he's never looking back.
He shared many graphic details of
working on the kill floor, and how
things got so sloppy with fast moving
lines. Regarding the brochure, he
said that our information was totally
accurate to what he experienced
while working in the slaughterhouse,
and that much of the stuff he saw
was even worse than we depict.
Another
example of the power of one booklet:
last fall, on the first day of class
at the National Gourmet Institute,
a classmate said: "One day
in high school, almost 10 years
ago, someone handed me a Why
Vegan and I was horrified,
shocked, and went vegan for several
years, took a break, now I'm trying
to be vegan again, and I want to
focus on vegan baking." This
past week, I gave her a few of the
new Vegan Outreach brochures and
she took a quick look at them and
thanked me for them, and said she
is going to definitely be vegan
again! She told some others in the
class, "I love Vegan Outreach
-- their info made me go vegan back
in high school!" A few non-vegan
classmates asked for copies.-Eileen Botti, 1/18/08

Vegan Outreach is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the suffering of farmed animals by promoting informed, ethical eating.